Engaging East Asian Integration: States, Markets and the Movement of People

7. Panel Discussion

193 7 Panel Discussion Takashi Shiraishi (moderator) Masahiko Hayashi Peter J. Katzenstein Vikram Nehru Jiro Okamoto Isamu Wakamatsu Shiraishi: I am supposed to wrap up the speeches and presentations made so far, but I am not going to do this because so many points were raised that I simply cannot summarize or wrap up all these. Instead, I would rather go directly into the discussion given the fact that time is quite limited. I start the discussion by raising perhaps two or three questions. Professor Katzenstein’s lecture was very comprehensive and I suspect that many people here find it quite different from the kind of discussions you normally hear about East Asian regional integration. Normally, it is economists, rather than political scientists or area specialists, who talk about integration. The kind of language deployed in discussing regional integration is very often, or almost, always economistic, but 194 Takashi Shiraishi here, it is not the case and I hope that this already shows a different way of looking at regional development. A number of people raised the question of the importance of the current [global financial] crisis. I would like to ask Professor Katzenstein about the implication of the current crisis for the American imperium. And another thing I noted, and found quite interesting, is the point Dr Surin Pitsuwan made in his eloquent speech and excellent presentation. Dr Okamoto argued that the kind of institution building over the last ten years or more in this region is offering us quite different perspectives. Dr Surin emphasized the centrality of ASEAN as well as incrementality. Dr Okamoto agreed with some of the points Dr Surin made, but stated that ASEAN is not exactly in the driver’s seat. I would like to invite Dr Okamoto as well as others to respond to this point. And finally, I invite some of the people to think about the ways in which the region or regional institutions which have been created over the last decade can be deployed to deal with the current crisis. I have in mind, of course, the Chiang Mai Initiative, and the questions of how feasible it is, what the role of the World Bank is, and of the Japanese Government and so on. Maybe Dr Nehru can at least comment on this. I would like to invite all the panelists, starting with Professor Katzenstein, to respond to some of the questions and ask them to raise their own questions and comments, or tell us whatever came to their minds while they were listening to other people’s lectures and presentations. Peter? Katzenstein: Thank you very much. It was a very interesting set of discussions and I have five points, just things which occurred to me as I was listening. In the last point, I will address the issue of the financial crisis as I see it. The first thing which struck me is the very different styles of analysis that we heard. This reminds me of the proverbial story of the blind men and the elephant. You ask the blind men to pin the tail on the elephant and some pin the tail on the head and some pin it on the trunk and some pin it onto the middle of the body. We had excellent detailed economic analysis, we had uplifting political speeches, we had statistical regression analysis and simulations and vocation economics, Panel Discussion 195 and we had a very probing political analysis by Dr Okamoto. So there is opposite thinking about the topic. There are many different avenues towards it and it is important to remind ourselves also that none of these by itself is likely to capture what is a very complex reality. The second point which struck me was is that if one were to be travelling from another part of the world and did not know much about Asia, one would remember that there is a threat of war in the Taiwan Straits and a threat of war on the Korean Peninsula. There was war between China and Vietnam not so long ago and there was the Vietnam War and the Korean War. One might think that the major focus of thinking about regional integration would be how to assure the peace. That actually does not seem to be driving the discussion. This is remarkably different from Europe. In Europe after 1945, regional integration was driven by one objective only: how...